All posts tagged spokenword

Now, i’ve been thinking about my previous posts and all the claims of what I did. I organized this, I did this, blahblahblah,..but when I really think about it, I was always part of organizing, amongst organizing and never alone organizing. I might just be trying to say that “I” can be deceptive and hope that it in no way omits anyone elses involvement in organizing and participating in the various events I may reference. I suppose that memory may be like that, placing you in the center of the event as though it revolved around you… anyway.. my first day in NYC, my first meeting in NYC, “New Yorkers Against Budget Cuts.”

I’m trying to recall the walk. The path that I took to get to the union hall, and what we talked about. I can piece a little together. Maybe I can’t, at least I can say, that I’d heard of New Yorkers Against Budget Cuts(NYABC). They recently organized an encampment against Bloomberg’s, you guessed it, budget cuts. They’d camped outside of city hall for weeks, been pushed around by the police, drums, and music, and finally a final push to stop the budget cut meeting from happening–arrests. New Yorkers Against Budget Cuts had also been part of a large coalition….(do I look up dates) which had marched on wall street earlier in 2011. From my understanding 10’s of thousands of people circled the area, but no one was able to get to wall street. That’s what I knew about NYABC, or what I have come to know.

I sat in meeting with rows of chairs, and folks started filing in. The folks who came in circled the chairs, I remember that, because it made me smile. It made me feel a bit more comfortable to be in a room that projected mutual respect, played at the idea of it. Uneasy at the meeting I didn’t plan on saying much. I was new to New York I couldn’t imagine adding to a conversation when I knew nothing about the context, or history, around various issues. I sat silent and listened to report backs and ideas being flung about a group of thirty or so people.

“What about this call from Adbusters?” someone said that. If I try to recall the text from the call now, A flood, Wall Street, tents, sept 17th, 20 thousand people will. I didn’t think much of it, but the room burst with conflict. Things like, “whose going to plan this, whose going to do this, whose going to do that, and the answers were: no one, no one, no one.” Eventually someone announced they’d contact Adbusters and let them know that they need to have organizers on the ground, that they shouldn’t just put out calls and expect people to do the work for them.

What came out of this conversation was a committee to plan an action around the August 2nd, debt default. And somewhere during this first meeting I had said 2 things. The first, I don’t call, but remember when I said it, the whole room grew quiet and nodded. I remember feeling like the whole room just noticed I existed. I also felt like I hit a right note. You know, like when something reverberates after mentioned. It felt good to be noticed, and good to feel like I’d added something to the conversation.

I also volunteered to be part of this planning committee. A committee to talk about what could be done around the August 2nd debt default, a meeting was planned for Friday, 7/22 to plan for August 2nd.

Arriving in NYC dead to politics, here I was, organizing. I wonder if I could place blame for the next year and a half of my life on this one meeting. Maybe it was coming from the Midwest and seeing 35 people gathered together and working together to accomplish something. Every meeting in North Dakota had been 5 people, or so, and now, well maybe it was scale. Regardless, I was excited. My roommates and I started watching M15 documentaries.